At 09:57 PM 6/28/99 -0700, Jessica Rasku wrote:
>On Mon, 28 Jun 1999, Ben Parker wrote:
>
>> This has been the normal behavior of LISTSERV since about 1986 and is based on
>> RFC822.  In this case, the LISTSERV list 'LSTSRV-L' is an intermediate sending
>> agent and that's what the sender field is used for.  The List Owner universal
>> address is  [log in to unmask]  The errors-to address is the Return-Path:
>> which is set to [log in to unmask]
>
>        For some reason my messages do not have a Return-Path that are in
>my mail directory.  Is this a problem that some server along the way is
>stripping it?  Or could it be related to either Pine or Procmail?  (I know
>that these aren't STRICTLY listserv questions, but they do relate, I'd be
>willing to go elsewhere if someone may be able to help me with a
>longstanding problem I have had, that my ISP is unwilling to do anything
>about...).

Well, Ben's terminology is a bit sloppy.  Senders (LISTSERV in this case)
never set a Return-Path: header.  What happens (if I may strain an analogy
a bit) is that email goes into an "envelope" which bears an envelope-sender
and envelope-recipient (sometimes referred to as RFC821 headers, SMTP MAIL FROM
and SMTP RCPT TO, or similiar terms -- after the document and protocol
which describe the envelope -- but I digress).  The errors-to address
Ben refers to is the envelope-sender.

When mail arrives at your site, the "mail delivery agent" (MDA) will remove
the envelope (which may name many recipients) and deliver the contents.  At
that point, the envelope sender is frequently put into a Return-Path header
by the MDA, but this is not required.  (It could not have been stripped
along the way, since it did not exist yet.)

Since you mentioned pine, you may have a UNIX "mbox" mailbox.  Try just looking
at it with "more" (and/or configure your pine to enable the "h" command to look
at full headers) and you may well see a line that starts with "From " (no colon)
just before the rest of the headers--with an address and a date/time.  This is
another place the envelope sender is commonly stored (the date/time is that
of receipt), and when it is thusly stored, it is rare that a Return-Path
header would be added just to write the same information a second time.

Hope that helps,
Stan